After causing a significant market frenzy in just four months, the decentralized social media site Freind.Tech, which was developed atop Coinbase’s Layer-2 platform “Base,” is currently experiencing a significant delay. But the hype surrounding this social networking platform has been fading quickly—within four months of its inception.
Vitalik Buterin Calls Friend.Tech “Bad DeFi”
Dragonfly’s founder, Haseeb, recently voiced his surprise at how quickly Friend.tech went from being a popular cryptocurrency to a forgotten initiative in just four months in a commentary. The general consensus is that Friend.tech’s bonding curve was a major factor in its demise, which led to a more thorough analysis of the lessons discovered and the subsequent redesign of bonding curves in the cryptocurrency industry.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin added his voice to the conversation in response to this comment, saying, “Bad gamefi is using financial speculation as a substitute for fun.” Blockchain games should be enjoyable like games,” he said, roughly echoing a thought he has expressed several times.
At the height of the frenzy around Freind.Tech, the site recorded a value lock of over $50 million. But since then, the TVL has been declining, falling 50% in the last four months to $26.46 million as of today, according to the DeFiLlama data.
Buterin Is Still Upbeat About Lens And Farcaster
Although Vitalik Buterin is not very optimistic about the direction that cryptocurrency social media is taking, he is nevertheless optimistic about some decentralized social media platforms, such as WRT Lens and Farcaster.
Farcaster is a decentralized social app protocol that gives users authority over their data and gives developers permissionless access to create apps on the network. It’s interesting to note that Buterin made these remarks while the Farcaster protocol had a 400% increase in daily active users after introducing “frames” to its social networking app Warpcast.
Warpcast’s frames now allow users to read external blog articles, complete transactions, mint NFTs, claim tokens, and take part in surveys—all from within the app itself, saving them from having to sign a document or click somewhere else. On January 27, this addition was put into effect.
Furthermore, according to statistics from Dune Analytics, the number of daily active users on the Farcaster network increased significantly, rising from about 5,000 on January 28 to over 24,700 by February 3. Furthermore, as of February 3, there were over 2 million new “casts” every day, a remarkable 1,000% increase from the around 200,000 that were recorded the week before on January 28.
Like Farcaster, Lens is a decentralized composable social graph that gives programmers the tools they need to build the upcoming social media apps.
